KIRKUS REVIEW

A searching account of the self in
Kierkegaard’s work.

Leone has been grappling with Kierkegaard
for the bulk of his adult life. Now, with a Ph.D. and Doctor of Theology degree
in hand, he captures that long-standing engagement. Kierkegaard’s complex
legacy has been claimed by two often strikingly disjunctive traditions: the
Christian and the existential. Leone, however, argues that a sensitive reading
of the Danish philosopher reveals that the two strains are inseparable,
producing an inclusive view of the self that is aware of its worldly
manifestations as well as its spiritual relationship to the absolute. “God is
the absolute,” he says, “but love, often associated with God, either as God’s
love for us or our love for God, is in the realm of the universal.” The
theological self crescendos in human spirituality in its relation to the
absolute, and the existential self asserts its being free of any independent or
external frameworks. “We are not manifestations of any objective overarching
reality, such as what the great systems represent, whether religious, political,
philosophical, or social,” Leone writes. Kierkegaard presented this dialectical
rendering of the self as a dialogue between Socrates and Jesus—representing “the
two poles of his existence”—which Leone examines as evidence of Kierkegaard’s complex
personality. Along the way, Leone astutely tackles some of the central topics
in Kierkegaard’s often esoteric body of work, including his unconventional view
of God, his radical interpretation of faith, and his groundbreaking view of ethics,
which turn out to be demanding but unencumbered by normative standards.
What emerges from this analysis is a lively portrait of a philosopher who
understood better than any philosopher before him the basic paradox of the self.
Leone’s prose is refreshingly lucid for what is essentially an academic
monograph. Still, the scholarly aims require a close read, so this may be challenging
for those not accustomed to dense, research-heavy literature.

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